Read&Write for Google part one.

The following was first written for my school's staff newsletter (Bear Essentials) May 30, 2014. Bracketed and italics have been added after publication in Bear Essentials.

Have you enabled Texthelp in your ugcloud account?  If you have, you see a gold and green pull down tab at the top of your documents.  Or maybe it is already pulled down and covering your document title - you can click the little up arrows and make it almost disappear.  But don’t do that, because I want to talk to you about how useful it can be.

(If you are not part of UGDSB, Texthelp, also known as Read&Write for Google is a Google app you can add to your account through the chrome store.)

If you are familiar with it, chances are you are in special ed and are using it as a text reader with some of our students.  It is a replacement for kurzweil in some cases.  It works for text documents, webpages and .pdfs if they are opened through Drive.

But it can do so much more.  There are 4 highlighters that you can use, much faster and simpler than using the highlight tool in the menu bar across the top of your document page.  There is also a button that will collect your highlights and collate them in another document.  There are a number of reasons both teachers and students might find this useful. The following ideas come from Rebecca Grimes (@glblcanuck), a fellow teacher in UGDSB.  

Ideas for Teacher Use in the Classroom

• Teachers could use the highlight tool to provide visual feedback --> provide students with a legend of what the colours mean, then just highlight the common errors without having to write the same comment over and over again (ie: verb tense = pink, sentence structure = yellow, missing citation = green)  If you make the legend consistent in your class or department it will be easy for you and your students.

• You could then use the "Collect" option to create a list of sample errors you could use with the class quickly and easily.

Ideas for Student Use in the Classroom:

• In Language classes, students could use the different colour to identify required language components in assignments.

• Students could use a colour to identify the facts that they've included in their assignment.
• Similarly, based on the business department’s self-evalution, they could use the different colours to demonstrate where they’ve met the requirement for the assignment.

• In English, students could identify quotations used in their essays.  (Use a different colour for each book if doing a comparative essay or, one colour for quotations from the novel and another colour for quotations from secondary sources.)

• Students could use the "Collect Highlights" feature to collate the highlighted information into an overview document that they could then share with their teacher.  

• For study purposes in any subject, students could highlight their notes and then export their highlights to create a page of key facts / ideas / etc to study.

Rebecca’s original blog post can be found at http://mllegrimes.blogspot.ca/2014/04/improving-feedback-and-student-self.html